Top Secret Sales Convention Held In The Open

Due to the NDS I signed, the names and the location have been changed.

Imagine if you will, a major sales convention from a tech company being held at a major hotel and convention center, right in front of the other guests and nobody knows the company or the technology.

The 4,000 attendees are wearing their oversize convention badges. On the badge are three things. The attendee name. A company name, which is actually an event production company and a phrase with a hashtag.

If you researched the company name you maybe found a few pages for a production company with no data on their client list. If you searched the hashtagged words there was nothing on Twitter. Wait! 4,000 people, signage all over the hotel and not one tweet anywhere in the world with this hashtagged phrase?

Setting aside the fact the attendees were told NOT to do anything with social media at this event going which was presenting for the following year’s technologies, I could not believe there was no history with that hashtag. As an experiment I asked somebody overseas to send out a tweet with that hashtag and it never came out on Twitter. I have no proof, but I am led to believe this Fortune 100 company had the power to secure or buy this hashtag from Twitter. If this is the case, not only did Twitter not publish any tweets with this hashtag but would also collect all of the the tweets and report them to their client. Just a what if, but plausible.

There are some other specific measures that were taken for the event, but I will not be disclosing them as they are quite clever. I just thought this Twitter angle was interesting. #topsecret